Destinations

Six weeks before we took off for St. Lucia, my nervous father texted me, “I’m buying some new clothes for the trip. Will I be okay in T-shirts and quick- dry tops?” “Sure!” I replied, “Think about buying some linen, too.” “Linen?” he texted back, “where on my body and where on a boat would I put linen?”

This article originally appeared in the December 2009 issueLook around a skippers’ meeting at a typical regatta and you’ll see all the usual suspects: seasoned salts, their families and a smattering of recent college grads or young adults sampling the sailing culture. The same folks populate most charter bases and destinations, which makes sense, considering the means and

When John Smith sailed into the Chesapeake Bay in 1607, he couldn’t have known the precedent he was setting. Ever since that early cruise, the area has been teeming with sailboats—everything from skipjacks dredging for oysters to race boats competing in regattas and flagships strutting their stuff at the United States Sailboat Show. With all of this on-water action, it’s no surprise that a dozen

You’ll have to go pretty far to find better sailing conditions or a more pleasant Caribbean destination than Antigua. The tradewinds here typically blow out of the east at 15 knots, and the island’s high coastline provides a spectacular backdrop. On shore you’ll find great restaurants, sailor-friendly bars, quaint villages and an abundance of great anchorages.“The four main places that I

I'm a meat and potatoes kind of guy, but here I am sampling octopus salad. When I grab it's usually a Bud, but today I'm enjoying a Karlovacko. I usually anchor in monosyllabic places like Gore Bay, but tonight the hook is dropping in Starogradski Zaljev. My chartplotter has always read longitude west of Greenwich, but this screen says 16 degrees east. Where am I?Croatia,

A pamphlet I picked up in a tourism office in Cahors, the big city” of the Lot Valley, refers to the area as la France profonde (“deep France”). The phrase is in fact the title of a book by a French academic, Michel Dion, and refers to the culture and traditions of village life in rural France—the “real” France as it was. The pamphlet doesn’t elaborate further, but this

We were ghosting toward the mainland, gybing back and forth to make the most of a faint morning breeze. The sun was out and it was hot. To the north I could see swells breaking over Horseshoe Ledge and a rock formation called The Drums. I was also keeping an eye out for lobster buoys. The tide was ebbing, setting up a wicked crosscurrent in spots, and I’d already been forced to alter course

In an age of instant knowledge, it’s rare to hear of places that are still “undiscovered.” This past summer, however, I had the opportunity to explore a cruising ground that, at least to the Western world, is still undiscovered: Montenegro’s Gulf of Kotor.For years, Montenegro was considered out of bounds for Western sailors. With a population of 650,000—roughly the size of Baltimore—the

You know you are in for a different kind of cruising experience when a) the guide book says: “Do not go ashore onto either of the Koh Liang islands. They are sites for the collection of swallow’s nests to make bird’s nest soup. They are patrolled by local Thais armed with automatic weapons;” and b) the charter base manager (ours was Andy Middleton, who runs the Sunsail base in Langkawi, Malaysia)

Though Guadeloupe has long been a popular charter destination for Europeans, the five-island archipelago is making its way onto the American radar, and for good reason. Explore the well-equipped marinas, protected bays, clean towns and tantalizing French cuisine through this photo gallery from SAIL’s most recent Guadeloupian